The treasurer at the AGM, holding a list of who still owes for the spring concert.
Choral societies and amateur orchestras have done it that way for a long time, and most of it works. Seaty is built around that world rather than against it. The reservations, the quotas, the programmes, the Gift Aid, the advert space in the interval programme, the Messiah rehearsal track going out to the basses on Tuesday. All in one place, with a free option for groups still handling payment themselves.
Ticketing software for amateur choirs, built around how a season actually runs.
Most ticketing platforms break down the moment your members start selling on the society's behalf. The whole concept of a member quota does not exist in their data model. Seaty is built the other way round: the quota, the running balance, and the end-of-season statement are first-class concepts, not workarounds. The same approach used by amateur dramatic societies on Seaty, applied to a concert season. Many Making Music affiliated societies sit comfortably in either world.
Concert ticket sales for orchestras playing two kinds of room.
Most amateur orchestras live in two worlds: a proper concert hall with stalls and circle for the showcase concerts, and a local church or community hall for chamber programmes. Seaty handles both. Reserved seating with a visual plan for the hall: the audience picks the seat, accessible places sit alongside companion seats, and the committee can hold a row for guests. General admission for the parish hall, where the chairs go out on the night anyway. Concert hall layouts are covered in detail in our guide on setting up a seating plan.
- Visual editor for any concert venue layout, from a 1,200-seat town hall to a side chapel
- Sections for stalls, circle, choir gallery, organ loft, and side seating
- Accessible seats and companion seating supported and clearly marked
- Members and committee can hold seats while a customer decides
- General admission works equally well for community-hall recitals and carol services
Member-driven ticket sales with quotas.
No more arguments at the AGM about who has actually paid
Allocate each member their share of tickets for the season or a particular concert. Sue is allocated twelve tickets for the spring programme. By the dress rehearsal she has sold eight of them at fifteen pounds, leaving four to shift and one hundred and twenty pounds owed to the society. John has sold none. Both see the same view on their phone that the committee sees in the dashboard. Stripe Checkout takes twelve pounds. It does not tell Sue she has four left to sell, send John a statement asking him to pay up, or surface the unsold-quota number at the production meeting.
- Quotas per member, per voice section, or per instrument group
- Members see their own sales and balances on their phone in real time
- Outstanding balances visible across the whole season at a glance
- Running totals update as cheques and bank transfers are logged
- Allocations carry over or reset between concerts as the committee chooses
Allocate quotas to your members and start selling.
Selling concert programmes online — alongside the advert space inside them.
The interval programme is often as significant a fundraiser as the tickets. The advert space inside it is sometimes more so. A single concert programme with a dozen quarter-page adverts from local businesses can clear the printing cost three times over. List the programme as a sellable item alongside tickets, list each advert slot as its own purchasable line, and reconcile both against the same concert. Advertising income goes into the season's accounts at the right time, against the right concert, instead of being added back in by hand at the AGM. Raffle tickets, drinks tokens, and recordings of past performances sit in the same flow.
- Programme sales alongside tickets in the same order
- Advert space sold per concert and tracked per business
- Raffle tickets, drinks tokens, and CDs of past performances in the same flow
- Buyers receive scannable vouchers to redeem at the front-of-house table
- Front-of-house can always see what is left to sell on the night
End-of-season balances and member statements.
Gift Aid and the long view for charitable choral societies.
Built around how UK choral charities actually report
Most established UK choirs and orchestras are registered charities, and a meaningful share of income comes through Gift Aid on the donation portion of a ticket or on a straight donation alongside it. Seaty marks eligible donations for Gift Aid automatically and keeps the declaration tied to each order. Audit logs span every concert in every season, so the treasurer has a clean trail at claim time and the trustees have what they need for the annual report. Full background sits in our guide on charity ticketing.
Gift Aid declarations
Eligible donations marked for Gift Aid automatically, with declarations stored against each order
Audit logs
Every order change is recorded so the treasurer has a clean trail at claim time and at audit
Multi-year history
Past concerts, members, finances, and donations stay accessible for trustee reporting
Why choirs and orchestras need more than a Stripe checkout.
Generic ticketing platforms get closer, and then they break. If your members are selling concert tickets to friends and family, most of them have no concept of who sold what — let alone running balances, end-of-season statements, or member-by-member reconciliation. Most charge per-ticket fees on every reservation, even free ones. For a society that books sixty reservations through members for every hundred paid online, those fees are forty pounds walking out of the season's accounts before the first rehearsal. Many do not handle Gift Aid at all, which is another twenty-five pence per pound left on the table. Our guide on how UK ticketing fees actually work goes into the numbers.
Seaty was built around the amateur-music shape from the start, which is why an amateur orchestra running a four-concert season can put every part of that season (tickets, programme adverts, member balances, Gift Aid, rehearsal files, attendance) into the same place without paying for the privilege of free reservations.
Free if the membership secretary is still taking the cheques.
For concerts where you would rather take card payments online, there is a simple per-transaction fee. You choose whether to absorb it or pass it on at checkout. There is no contract either way. If your society is a registered charity, our guide on selling tickets for charity events covers the Gift Aid side, and our guide on how UK ticketing fees actually work goes into what the numbers look like across the platforms you might be comparing.
Rehearsals, sectionals, and the run-up to a Messiah.
Weekly rehearsals on a Tuesday. Sectionals for sopranos one week, altos the next. A sitzprobe with the orchestra two weeks out. A dress run in the venue on the Saturday morning. Schedule the lot in one place and let members see only the calendar that applies to them. QR check-in tracks attendance for the music director, which matters most when a long programme like a Messiah needs sustained presence in the room over a fifteen-week run.
- Recurring weekly rehearsals with one-off sectionals layered on top
- QR check-in for members on arrival, no admin involvement needed
- Attendance history per member, per voice section, and per concert
- Calendar views for season, month, week, or single day
- Concerts in churches and community halls inherit the same scheduling tools
Sheet music and rehearsal recordings for choir members.
Link Dropbox to share scores, individual vocal lines, full-mix rehearsal tracks, programme notes, and the conductor's preferred tempo recordings with members. The soprano line for Messiah, the bass line for the same, the audio of the conductor talking through the rallentando in the final chorus, choreography videos for the carol service processional. Audio and video play directly in the Seaty app, with offline access for the train home from rehearsal. PDFs sort intelligently by movement or section, so the file list does not become its own problem and the conductor stops fielding emails asking which folder the tenor part is in.
Audio playback with pinned moments for the bars that nobody can quite get right.
In a long work it is rarely the whole movement that needs work, it is the four bars before letter G. Pin bar 47 in Messiah's For unto us so the altos can practise the tricky entry on repeat. Pin the two-bar pickup before letter C in the Brahms so the tenors can hear the conductor's preferred tempo. The pin sits in the file at the exact second, so members tap once and land in the right place. The altos actually practise the entry, instead of giving up on the audio file. The conductor stops being a Dropbox link distributor.
Set up the Messiah season in an afternoon.
A note on concerts in churches.
Related documentation
Ready to set up your next concert?
